Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

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Notes

[As Bifo provides no footnotes in Félix, all notes are provided by the translators;

full references to works cited are in the Bibliography]

Preface

1. Giuseppina Mecchia would like to acknowledge and thank her colleagues in
   the French and Italian Department at the University of Pittsburgh for their
   continued support. Charles J. Stivale would like to acknowledge the support
   of the Humanities Center at Wayne State University for its support of this
   project.


2. Notable exceptions to this lack of engagement are by Gary Genosko, Félix
   Guattari, An Aberrant Introduction (2002) and The Party Without Bosses. Lessons
   on Anti-Capitalism from Félix Guattari and Luís Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva(2003).


3. The recent interest in this movement has mostly sprung from the success of
   Empire(2000), the book authored by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Since
   then, the works of Tronti, Negri, Panzieri and to a minor extent of Bifo
   himself have been the object of a sustained critical and political debate.


4. Capital, according to the theorists of Potere Operaio, was not the true leading
   force of economic and political development: labour came first, and if in fact
   labour came to be subjugated, this would still not cancel its ontological
   primacy in the production of goods, structures, and even of cultural prac-
   tices. See for instance Antonio Negri in the essay ‘The Constitution of Time’:
   ‘Behind the category of relative surplus-value hide the movements of pro-
   ductive co-operation that – originally (it should be forcefully underlined)
   
   
   • presents itself as the refusal of capitalist command over production and
     as the attempt, always frustrated but not less real, of constructing an auto-
     nomous time’ (Time for Revolution, 73).
   
   
   
   


5. It is worth remembering that in 1970 the University of Bologna inaugurated
   the DAMS (Dipartimento di Arte, Musica e Spettacolo), the first and only
   academic programme in Italy where contemporary forms of communication
   were being studied together with more traditional performance arts. DAMS
   attracted young performers and aspiring social and cultural critics from
   all over Italy, and figures such as Umberto Eco delivered memorable and
   crowded seminar lectures.


6. A detailed assessment of Guattari’s involvement with these post-mediatic ini-
   tiatives is to be found in the article by Bernard Prince and François Videcoq
   (2006) entitled ‘Félix Guattari et les agencements post-media’.

Chapter 1

1. Bifo refers to the Global Action Day that occurred on 30 November 1999, a
   broad range of demonstrations organized world-wide in protest against the

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